Talk:Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Khazar2 (talk · contribs) 01:41, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm very interested in this topic and will be glad to take this review. Initial comments to follow in the next 1-3 days. Thanks in advance for your work on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 01:41, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

General comments

The prose of the article is excellent, the discussion appears to cover the main aspects of the topic, and the photographs are apropos and lovely. I saw at WikiProject Ford that you're Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Gerald Ford Library--I wish we had more Wikipedians with that kind of access, and I hope this will be the first of many GA nominations from you!

Right now, the biggest issue for the article in terms of the GA criteria is the lack of secondary-source discussion of the summit, which raises concerns for criteria 2b (reliable sources) and 2c (original research). Per WP:RS, "Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources", and "Large blocks of material based purely on primary sources should be avoided." Here, virtually all the information appears to be gathered from the memoirs of Ford, Kissinger, Gromyko, and Dobrynin. This raises minor verifiability issues (it's better to have a historian publishing through a press known for fact-checking to sort through all their stories for us), but more importantly it means that no scholarly perspective on the talks is presented. I'd suggest bringing in major biographies of Ford or Kissinger, or major scholarly works on arms control history, and reworking the article to rely primarily on these; the secondary (or tertiary) sources should guide the structure, while the primary sources fill in only occasional details. (This isn't to say that you need to cite twenty books to make this article complete; just drawing on 3-4 major sources could be enough for GA purposes.)

Smaller issues:

• The lead should try to touch on all sections of the article per WP:LEAD (right now, the aftermath isn't covered).
• If possible, it would be better to note page numbers for quotations individually; giving a 10-15 page range would make these difficult to verify. It's probably just within GA requirements, though.
• There may be a few too many images per WP:LAYOUT, unless the article is expanded to better absorb them. The four I'd pick to remove would be File:Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev greets President Ford - NARA - 7157128.jpg, File:A late night meeting of the Vladivostok Summit, 1974 - NARA - 7161605.jpg, File:President_Ford_tours_Vladivostok,_1974_-_NARA_-_7161934.jpg, and File:Photograph_of_the_Four_Presidents_(Reagan,_Carter,_Ford,_Nixon)_toasting_in_the_Blue_Room_prior_to_leaving_for_Egypt..._-_NARA_-_198522.jpg, but that's just a personal call. You may be able to get away with leaving them all.
• The aside about Ford learning the score of the football game seems a bit trivial. (a criterion 3b issue)
• Dobrynin should be clearly identified on his first mention in the article
• Not a GA criterion, but no need to link common terms (tiger, Japan, etc.)
• The aftermath section seems to particularly need expansion--what were the views of later historians on the legacy of this summit?

Because the big point above, primary v. secondary sourcing, is presumably going to require some significant work to fix, I'm going to close this review for now. I hope you'll rework and renominate this one soon, however--I enjoyed reading it quite a bit, and it's already close to GA in many aspects. Thanks again for all your work, -- Khazar2 (talk) 02:35, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the review. I wrote the article entirely with sources available at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library while I was a Wikipedian in Residence there, and they essentially have just primary sources in their collections. Because of this, I don't have easy access to the necessary secondary sources for a re-write (and I didn't realize that it would require essentially an entire re-write for GA status), so I don't think that now is the time for me to completely re-write the article. It might also be useful to find someone else who isn't as attached to the layout and structure of the article as I am to cut it up and make it better. Thanks for the review and the insights. Take care! Michael Barera (talk) 13:10, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

My pleasure. -- Khazar2 (talk) 14:08, 16 June 2013 (UTC)